I am trying to clear my name. A building: square, central courtyard cut-out, offices along the sides and stairwells at the corners. I’m here with a small crew? You all wait outside while I try and clear my name. An interview? An interrogation? Some simple misunderstanding? The office is empty when I go inside. Do I steal the evidence? Is there even evidence? Would that even work to clear my name, stealing? Smash! Turn, run. Around and around the building we (I) go. Take corners, take them sharp. Up and down stairs? Chase. Chasing. Be chased. Flee; run and hide. Lose your bearings. Where are we? Where am I? What are you still doing here, my friends? Has my name been cleared or must I continue to run?
There may be a moral to this story.
“Wild Bill” Hickock narrates.
Narrator/point-of-view: third person, detached. Like 40s detective noir or some awful late 90s independent cinema. I’m involved but not central, hardly pivotal.
Nate (from Six Feed Under) has moved on to some private detective’s agency on the coast of Florida. He’s investigating some shady real estate deals there. Something is seriously wrong; all of the dogs that live along the beach have disappeared. Everyone in the community suspects that the new hotel baron in town is somehow responsible. It is so difficult to gather the evidence though. It all revolves around those dogs, those missing dogs. He’s trying to enlist Frederico (who has also moved into the private dick business) for help on this case.
I get all of this second hand over lunch. Rico is raging over the whole deal. He’s struck out on his own now; this has nothing to do with him. Over roast beef sandwiches, he confides that he’s sure it was that dyke the real estate baron, as well. He’s got some good evidence against her but he’s certainly not going to be sharing that information with Nate. He wants the credit on this case.
Perhaps we’ll get a few posts from the road but tomorrow morning A. & I are out for a holiday road trip. A few parting shots before we jam out, however:
- Get your holiday/2006-year-in-revue retrospective mix at Synaptic Clog. (Yes, I am a cross-posting whore.)
- Careful with your bottle-opening methods:
- You know what they say about the Devil and Idling:
- Most of all, don’t forget to smile:
Peace out, be merry, and watch for the flood of dream posts when I get back. I’ll be journaling those from the road Long Hand style.
currently playing: Pink Floyd “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”
The dentist is very concerned about the state of my bottom teeth. He won’t tell me what’s wrong but he does explain that they’re in very bad shape. He’s afraid that he needs to pull them. From the bottom left incisor through the next four choppers. It’s going to be quite a procedure. He sends his assistant from the room to prep and then looks me in the eye. “We can replace those, you know…” I think he means dentures or some other kind of prostheses and I cringe at the thought; that’s hardly a true replacement. He gets a glimmer in his eye (however) and positions himself a little more closely.
The dentist goes on at some length about some miracle of modern genetics and protein synthesis. “FGF can grow you some new teeth.” I’m not buying it but the price is modest when you consider it could mean new, stronger teeth for that bottom row. It is a new procedure though and not approved by the FDA nor anyone else for that matter. So we’ll need to keep it quiet. He sets up the machine to start synthesizing the requisite proteins and when his assistant returns, it’s a quick injection of pain-killer and then the pliers come out to start yanking those teeth out.
As they finish up though, other folks start to come into the room. The dentist gives me a wink as if to say, “I’ll be back in a little bit to finish up,” and disappears into the back room. His assistant shrugs and throws a towel over the protein synthesizer. For the first time, I notice the mountain in the back of the dentist’s office and note that everyone who keeps coming in has done so to sled or ski down this steep hill.
So I decide to sled while I wait for my teeth to grow and hope no one notices that I’m missing five already.
An almost high school hallway but it never ends, doorways on all sides. I’m too old for these childish games but just the same, I’m trying to fit in with this half-dozen or so of The Cool Kids. We’re all laughing and I think we’re laughing together but they’re laughing at me. Like I’m The Slow Kid, the one that everyone picks on. You fit in but only to have the jokes be at your expense. They get harsher as they get more subtle. Until they’ve taken your jacket. (My jacket.) And we chase them down the hall until I can catch the one kid (D.C.?) who has stumbled and nearly tripped. He tripped when they tossed him the jacket. Now I grapple with him and get him into a headlock and wrestle him all that distance back down the hallway to my room. And I open the door to discover that he (D.C.?) is already there (in my room) waiting for me, relieved that I’d managed to capture him and return the jacket to myself. He explains that he’s been on my side all along. But then who do I have in a headlock? I thrust the jacket aside to see that I’ve got myself in a headlock.
- Some amusing haiku movie reviews (such as this and these) helped your narrator here bring home a brand new camera from the company holiday party this year. Huzzah! Now (after I was just beginning to master the old one) to learn how to use it…
(How am I doing so far?)
- Also, because we went from a Sony to a Canon, we realized that the ol’ Memory Stick was out. But of course, the 16MB SD card that came with the Canon was hardly going to service us for the up-coming trip to Maryland. Luckily, between rebates and an unredeemed gift card, we managed to grab a 1GB SD card for about $5. Sweet.
- Also, my dad just jumped on the Flickr bandwagon to better share his international travels. Now playing? His bad ass trip to China. Enjoy.
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via 24th Floor (via command_tab): A good (and succinct) redux on how to get PNG’s alpha working properly in Internet Explorer.
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Free Audio Editor and Recorder
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Bruce Sterling @ Beyond the Beyond on his definition of “centipedes”. (And yes, that’s *our* Pete Welsch…)
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An OS X preference pane that allows you to set rules for launching/quitting applications when certain events happen (e.g., launch an application when a drive is mounted…)
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“The tourist map of literature” - - a weird little web app that lets you plug in an author’s name and watch other authors’ names float around it, closing in based on the strength of their connection. (Not well-documented (e.g., how are the names weighted
